A Life (36 page)

And she made her escape.

She set off on foot once more, not caring where she went. She hurried along as though engaged upon some important errand, keeping close to the walls and continually jostled by people carrying parcels; she crossed the streets without looking to see if anything was coming, and coachmen swore at her; she stumbled over steps in the pavements, not looking where she was going. She just kept on going, her mind far away on other things.

Suddenly she found herself in a public garden, and felt so weary that she sat down on a bench. She remained there for what seemed a very long time, unaware of her tears until passers-by  stopped and stared at her. Then she felt very cold, and stood up to leave; her legs could barely support her, so weak and exhausted was she.

She wanted to go and have some soup in a restaurant, but she lacked the courage to enter such an establishment, overcome by a sort of shame, or fear, a kind of modest desire to conceal her sorrow which she could sense was quite plain to see. She would stop for a moment outside the door, and look in, and see all the people sitting at tables and eating; and then she would walk away, intimidated, but telling herself:

'Next time I'll go in.'

And next time she did not venture in either.

In the end she bought a small crescent-shaped roll from a baker's, and began to nibble it as she walked. She was extremely thirsty, but she did not know where to find a drink, so she went without.

She walked through another archway and found herself in another garden, surrounded by arcades. She recognized the Palais-Royal.
*

Since the sun and the walking had warmed her up again, she sat down for another hour or two. A crowd of people came past, an elegant crowd all chatting, and smiling, and greeting one another, the kind of happy crowd where the women are beautiful and the men are rich, people who live only for self-adornment and the pursuit of pleasure.

Jeanne, alarmed to find herself in the midst of this brilliant throng, stood up intending to beat a hasty retreat; but suddenly it occurred to her that she might meet Paul here; and she began to wander round studying the faces, continually walking up and down from one end of the garden to the other with her rapid, timorous steps.

People turned round to look, others laughed and pointed at her. She noticed and fled, thinking that no doubt they were amused by her appearance and by the green check dress for which Rosalie had chosen the material and which the seamstress at Goderville had made up according to Rosalie's specifications.

She was even loath now to ask other pedestrians the way. But  she risked it nevertheless and eventually found her way back to the hotel.

She spent the rest of the day sitting on a chair, with her feet up on the bed, not stirring. Then she had dinner, which consisted as on the previous evening of soup and some meat. Then she went to bed, performing each action mechanically, out of habit.

The next day she went to the police station and asked them to find her son. They could promise nothing, but they would nevertheless see what they could do.

Then she roamed the streets, always hoping to bump into him. And she felt more entirely alone in this bustling crowd, more wretched and lost, than if she had been standing in the middle of an empty field.

When she returned to the hotel in the evening, she was told that someone had been asking for her on behalf of Monsieur Paul and that he would come back the next day. Her heart leapt at the news, and she did not sleep a wink that night. What if it were Paul himself? Yes, it must be, even though she had not recognized him from the details she had been given.

About nine o'clock there was a knock on her door, and she shouted: 'Come in!', ready to rush forward with open arms. A total stranger walked in. And while he was apologizing for disturbing her and explaining what business brought him, namely one of Paul's debts for which he had come to demand payment, she could feel herself crying but tried to conceal the fact, removing each tear with the tip of her finger as they welled up in the corners of her eyes.

The man had learnt of her arrival from the concierge in the rue du Sauvage, and being unable to find the young man, he was now turning to his mother. And he held out a piece of paper which she accepted automatically. She read the figure of ninety francs, took out her money, and paid.

That day she did not go out.

The following day other creditors presented themselves. She gave them all the money she had left, keeping back only twenty francs; and she wrote to Rosalie informing her of the situation.

She spent her days wandering about, waiting for her maid to  reply, not knowing what to do or where to while away the endless, dismal hours, with no one to exchange a kind word with, no one who knew of her sad plight. She walked in no particular direction, now filled with a longing to depart, to go back home, back to her little house beside the lonely road.

Only a few days earlier she could not have borne to live there any longer, so overwhelmed by sadness had she been; and now she felt that, on the contrary, she could not live anywhere else but there, in the place where her life of dull routine had taken root.

At last, one evening, she received a letter and two hundred francs. Rosalie wrote:

'Madame Jeanne, come back at once, because I shan't send you any more. As for Monsieur Paul, I shall go and look for him myself as soon as we hear news of him.

Greetings. Your servant,

Rosalie'

And one bitterly cold morning, with the snow falling, Jeanne set off on her return to Batteville.

XIV

Thenceforth she never went out, never stirred. She would get up each morning at the same time, look out of the window to see how the weather was, and then go downstairs and sit by the fire in the living-room.

She would spend whole days sitting there, not moving, her eyes fixed on the flames, letting her sorry thoughts wander where they pleased and observing the sad procession of her miseries. Darkness would gradually descend on the little room, and still she would not have moved, except to put more logs on the fire. Then Rosalie would bring in the lamp and exclaim:

'Come now, Madame Jeanne, it's time you were up and about, or you'll not be hungry again this evening.'

She was often pursued by obsessive notions which refused to go away, and tormented by trivial concerns, as the slightest matter came to assume the utmost importance in her ailing mind.

She lived above all in the past, in the distant past, haunted by memories of her early days and her honeymoon in far-off Corsica. The island's landscapes, long since forgotten, would suddenly appear before her among the blazing embers in the grate; and she would recall every detail, every little incident, every face she had met there. The features of Jean Ravoli, their guide, never left her; and sometimes she thought she could hear his voice.

Then she would think back to the tranquil years of Paul's childhood, when he used to make her prick out his lettuce seedlings and she knelt in the heavy soil beside Aunt Lison, each of them vying to please the child in the care and trouble they took, competing to see who could show the greatest skill in getting the young shoots to take and producing the greatest number of successful plants.

And softly her lips would murmur: 'Pullie, my little Pullie,' as if she were talking to him; and with her reverie now focused on this single word, she would sometimes spend hour after hour  trying to spell out the letters of his name in the air with a single, outstretched finger. She would trace them slowly, in front of the fire, imagining that she could see them, and then, thinking that she had made a mistake, she would begin the P again, her arm trembling with the effort, desperately trying to spell out the name from beginning to end; and afterwards, when she had finished, she would start all over again.

Eventually she could manage no more; she would become confused and start sketching out other words until she was driven almost mad with frustration.

She acquired all the obsessive habits of people who live on their own. The tiniest object not in its right place irritated her.

Rosalie often insisted that she take exercise, and used to lead her out onto the road; but twenty minutes later Jeanne would say: 'I can go no further, my dear,' and sit down at the edge of the ditch.

Soon she came to hate all forms of movement, and would remain in bed for as long as possible.

Ever since childhood one particular, ineradicable habit had remained with her, that of getting up immediately after drinking her morning café au lait. Indeed she was excessively attached to this particular beverage, and to have been deprived of it would have meant more to her than any other such deprivation. So each morning she would await Rosalie's arrival with an almost physical longing; and as soon as the full bowl had been placed on the bedside table, she would sit up and quickly, almost greedily, drink it down. Then she would throw back the sheets and begin to dress.

But gradually she had begun to sit dreaming for a few moments after replacing the bowl on its plate. Subsequently she had taken to lying down again; and then with each succeeding day she extended this period of idleness, which lasted until Rosalie would return, furious, and dress her almost by force.

In fact she no longer seemed to have any will of her own, and each time her maid asked her advice, or put a question to her, or wanted her opinion on some matter, she replied:

'Just as you please, my dear.'

She believed herself to be so directly the target of unrelenting misfortune that she became as fatalistic as an Oriental; and the habitual experience of seeing all her hopes and dreams crumble and vanish meant that she shrank from all further endeavour, and she would spend whole days in hesitant deliberation before doing the simplest thing, persuaded that she was bound to choose the wrong course and that it would turn out badly.

She kept saying:

'I just haven't had any luck in life.'

Whereupon Rosalie expostulated:

'And what would you say if you had to earn your daily bread, if you had to get up at six o'clock every morning and go and do a full day's work! Yet lots of women have to, and when they get too old, they die of poverty.'

Jeanne would reply:

'But I'm all alone, my son has abandoned me.

And then Rosalie became furiously angry:

'Oh dear, how dreadful! And so? What about the sons who have to go off for their military service? And the ones that emigrate to America?'

For her America represented some remote place where people went to make their fortune and never came back.

Then she would say:

'There always comes a time when you have to part,'coz old and young was never meant to live together.'

And finally, by way of fierce conclusion:

'And anyway, what if he were dead?'

To which Jeanne would offer no reply.

She recovered a little of her strength when the air turned milder at the beginning of spring, but she devoted this new energy merely to wallowing yet deeper in her sombre thoughts.

When she went up to the attic one morning to fetch something, she happened to open a box full of old calendars; they had kept them all, as some country folk do.

It seemed to her as though she were rediscovering the years of her own past, and she was filled with strange and conflicting emotions at the sight of this heap of cardboard squares.

She took them down to the living-room. There were calendars of every shape and size, large and small. And she began to arrange them by year on the table. Suddenly she came on the first one, the one she had taken with her to Les Peuples.

She gazed at it for a long time, at the dates she had crossed out on the morning of her departure from Rouen, the day after she had left the convent. And she wept. She wept slow, dejected tears, the pitiable tears of an old woman confronting the spectacle of her unhappy life spread out before her on this table.

And an idea occurred to her which soon developed into a terrible, ceaseless, unrelenting obsession. She decided to try and piece together everything she had done, almost day by day.

One after another she pinned the bits of yellowing cardboard to the tapestries on the wall, and she would spend hours in front of one or other of them, thinking: 'Now what happened that month?'

She had underlined each of the particularly memorable dates in her past, and sometimes she managed to recover an entire month by recalling, one by one, all the minor incidents which had preceded or followed an important event, then grouping and linking them.

By virtue of dogged concentration, much searching of her memory, and a concerted will to succeed, she managed to reconstruct her first two years at Les Peuples almost in their entirety: the recollections of her distant past flooded back with remarkable clarity, as though etched in relief.

But the following years seemed lost in a fog, each one merging and overlapping with the other; and sometimes she would spend endless hours peering at one particular calendar, as her mind reached out to yesteryear but failed even to remember if it was in that particular piece of cardboard that such and such a memory were to be found.

She would move from one to the other, circling this living-room that was surrounded by these registers of bygone days as though it had been hung with prints depicting the Stations of the Cross. Suddenly she would pull up her chair in front of one of them, and remain staring at it, stock-still, till nightfall, rapt in her investigations.

Then all at once, as the sap began to rise in the warmth from the sun, and the crops began to shoot in the fields, and the trees turned green, and the apple trees blossomed in the apple-yards like pink balls and filled the plain with their perfume, she was seized with a restless excitement.

Now she could not sit still. She was constantly on the move, going out and coming home twenty times a day; and sometimes she would wander off in the distance, from farm to farm, exalting in a kind of frenzy of regrets.

The sight of a daisy huddled in a tuft of grass, or a ray of sunlight slanting through the leaves, or the blue of the sky reflected in a puddle-filled rut, moved and warmed her heart, and unsettled her by recalling distant sensations, like the echoes of those emotions she had felt when, as a young girl, she had wandered dreamily round the countryside.